NEW DELHI: While Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi is touring the country to highlight the problems of farmers, his mother and party president Sonia Gandhi has taken up the cause of unemployed pilots trained at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi. In a letter to civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapati Raju, Gandhi raised concern over the dismal record of campus placements at IGRUA as only 30% of the successful trainees get employed even after Air India and Qatar agreed to recruit pilots from the institute. "Air India had committed to take 50% of its needs from IGRUA.

NEW DELHI: Air India has rejected about 40 of the 160 pilots, who had appeared for interviews on concerns raised by psychologists, especially after the Germanwings incident, where the co-pilot deliberately crashed a plane killing 150 people on board. This is the first time that an Indian carrier rejected so many pilots on the basis of feedback given by psychologists. Air India, which announced the interview results on Thursday evening, could fill only 78 of the 197 vacancies. "This is the first time we had psychologists from the Air Force on the interview panel.

MUMBAI | NEW DELHI: Up in the air, Indian women are increasingly in charge. For a country that can't ensure a woman's safety or her basic rights on the ground, the recruitment record of India's airlines presents a contrast. As a result, the next time you take a flight in India, the chances of the pilot being a woman are much higher than anywhere else in the world. India currently has 5,100 pilots, of which 600, or 11.7 per cent, are women, according to ministry of civil aviation data.

NEW DELHI: 320 pilots flew aircraft with lapsed Pilot Proficiency Check in 2014 with 219 of them belonging to private airlines and 101 to Air India, Lok Sabha was informed today. During DGCA audit of training facilities of airlines in 2014, it was found that maximum numbers of violation were done by Jet Airways with 130 of its pilots flying without the mandatory check, followed by Air India 101 pilots, Air India Express 70, Spicejet 10 and IndiGo nine, Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju said in a written reply.

NEW DELHI: Ladakh's connectivity with rest of India could get curtailed with the union of Air India (domestic) pilots asking its members not to operate flights to Leh. AI, Jet and GoAir are among the Indian carriers that fly to Leh. The Indian Commercial Pilots' Association (ICPA) took this move after a private airline complained against AI and another airline for landing in Leh without meeting the minimum visibility conditions of this high altitude airport.

NEW DELHI:Twenty-three senior most Air India (AI) commanders have sought no objection certificates from the airline to quit. They have done so over the management's continued failure to have pay parity between pilots of erstwhile Indian Airlines (IA) and Air India even eight years after the two airlines were merged. A letter signed by 23 executive pilots from erstwhile IA, who fly the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, has been sent to the aviation ministry and AI's outgoing CMD Rohit Nandan protesting huge difference in pay with pilots who fly the same aircraft.

NEW DELHI: France is offering India 36 Rafale fighter jets in fly-away condition at the same price which it pays to French defence major Dassault Aviation to equip its own air force, defence sources said. They added that this means that the cost per aircraft will be much lower than the price that was being worked out under the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) tender, which also involved transfer of technology. "The price of the aircraft for India will be the same as the price at which it is sold to the French air force.

Flagship carrier Air India's woes deepened as it was forced to cancel most of its domestic flights by a pilots' strike over pay that entered its fourth day Saturday.The financially ailing state-run carrier, which says it has lost $6 million in revenues so far due to the strike, said it was operating just 39 domestic flights out of its regular 320, according to the Press Trust of India.The airline is "operating on only trunk routes" to major Indian cities, an Air India spokesman said."We do not have any pilots," he added.